Schemes: Printing Manuals

Joseph Moxon's Mechanick exercises on the whole art of printing (London, 1683) was the first printer's manual to be published in the English language. It is probably the most famous early modern printer's manual, having been treated to exhaustive bibliographic study by Herbert Davis and Harry Carter (Oxford University Press, 1958). However, there are other significant manuals from which one may glean distinctive practices associated with book production. In the late 1960s, Philip Gaskell published an annotated bibliography of printers' manuals to 1850. In 2005, David Pankow curated an RIT exhibition of seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century printers' manuals that focused on English and American works. More recently, the San Francisco Public Library has compiled an online bibliography of printers' manuals. In comparatively analyzing these extant works, one notices divergent perceptions about the origins of printing in western Europe, trade economics, and hieratic positions within printing shops. Some manual writers assess orthography and punctuation in addition to fundamental materials and technical production. As Frans Janssen has noted, Moxon's situation was by no means typical for a seventeenth-century printer. He was a Royal Hydrographer, Fellow of the Royal Society, a translator, a publisher of globes and maps.

[Pictured above: Lay scheme from Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, vol. 2 (London: 1683). Special Collections Department, Tulane University Library].